Supply Chain Technology Blog

Voice in the Multi-Lingual Warehouse

Today’s warehouse has become a melting pot of different cultures, races, and languages, which can cause a unique challenge when trying to implement voice. There is a common misconception that having workers that speak different languages (or even speak with heavy accents) will disqualify you from using voice in the warehouse, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Vocollect Voice provides a large amount of flexibility when designing your voice system, regardless of the diversity of your warehouse.

The Technology

The Vocollect Voice recognition engine is language-independent, meaning the system recognizes responses, not the language it is spoken in. It is also speaker-dependent, which requires each user to train the system to recognize their individual language, dialect, and speech patterns before use. These training sessions are typically 15-30 minutes long, and a unique profile is created for each user storing their speech patterns and responses.

If your workers all understand the same language…

For many warehouses, workers will all understand one language, but may struggle to speak it. Vocollect’s unique voice-recognition system allows workers to hear the system in any of the 35 different languages offered, and respond in another, as long as the response language is consistent with the voice profile they created during training. This is the most common way to adapt to a multi-lingual warehouse, as it only requires one language to be loaded into the system.

Example: When training the voice system, one worker could respond “uno” when prompted with “one”, “dos” when prompted with “two”, and so on. Then, when moving through the warehouse, they would continue to respond in Spanish, while listening in English. Another worker would complete the same training, but respond with “eins” and “zwei”.

If your workers do not understand the same language…

Alternatively, if one language is not understood by the entire workforce, each worker can hear and respond to commands in 35 languages: Arabic, Cantonese Chinese, Taiwanese Mandarin, PRC Mandarin, Czech, Danish, Netherlands Dutch, Belgian Dutch, Australian English, UK English, US English, Finnish, Canadian French, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Latin Spanish, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish. This requires multiple languages to be loaded into the system, and often requires a manager or supervisor who can speak each language used in the warehouse.

Example: One worker would hear and respond “one”, another would hear and respond “uno” and another would hear and respond “eins”.

Although a multi-lingual workforce can be challenge, it should not stop you from considering voice. There are many options that will allow you to adapt to your changing workforce while still realizing the many benefits of the Vocollect Voice system. If you are interested in learning more about voice for your workforce, you can contact us at info@vitechgroup.com or www.vitechgroup.com.